Wilde Card: Immortal Vegas, Book 2 (23 page)

“We will hold the line.” Armaeus’s voice had also changed—it was deeper, fuller. I turned at a sudden move to my right, then tackled a man fleeing down the room toward a far door—good to know, since that was probably the exit out of this hellhole—and worked his gun free. Except when I swung it back around, I didn’t know where to aim. Mantorov was in the middle of some kind of epileptic fit, and Armaeus was…well, disintegrating.

“
Eternity
…” breathed the voice, but it no longer spoke through Mantorov. It came directly through the wall.
“It takes on a whole new meaning when you face it, doesn’t it? You are weakening, Armaeus. Your strength ebbing away.”

The wall bowed outward from fine slits carved into the gold, and Simon cursed, his electricity going dormant while more burned skin filled the air with acrid fumes.

“Finish the spell, Magician!” Mantorov struggled upright again, regaining his capacity for speech. He wheeled toward Armaeus. “You cannot stop now!”

“It is no longer the time of creation.” Armaeus closed his hands around the scroll cases. “You are forbidden!”

I could see light crackling through the bones on his skin and I stared, horrified. Armaeus swelled and seemed to come apart at the joints, pure light cascading from him as he worked to process the full weight of the magic he was wielding. Panic seared through me and I staggered forward, struggling to see whatever was coming through the wall.

And then I did.

Terror stilled the scream in my throat. In that moment, I was no longer in the subterranean chamber of gold. I was in my backyard, the wall of fire and pain behind me. And I was running, running, my eyes streaming with tears, my vision blurred, unable to escape the fire. It raged around me, and as I stared, a creature reared in the far distance. A blue dragon trapped on a field of red. Its wings spread wide and—

“No!” I cried before I fully realized what I was doing, and emptied a round of firepower into Mantorov’s body. He jerked with the blast, toppling toward the cracking wall. For a moment, he gazed at me with all-consuming shock in his face, and then his expression morphed to fury as the man who’d stolen so many children had something stolen from him. Something he also could not get back, no matter how he tried.

“I cannot die!” he roared. “I cannot!”

“The hell you can’t!”

“
Nigin!
” Armaeus’s command overrode all the noise. The wall seemed to draw back into itself, sweeping Mantorov with it in a burst of white-hot fire. The scream of the dragon was the last thing I heard—and only then did I notice another, closer roar.

“Not this again,” I groaned.

Water crashed onto us from all sides, swamping the room. Simon, closest to the door, was carried out in the initial burst before he started running of his own volition, screaming about stairs. Let no one ever say Simon wasn’t smart.

“Go,” Armaeus cried, half collapsing on the table in the center of the room. “Follow Simon.”

“You first!” I waded toward him until I stood next to him in front of the smoking scroll cases. “Or I won’t.”

The Magician cursed something in an ancient language I couldn’t make out, but when he turned toward the door, I swept the scroll cases into my jacket. I wasn’t coming halfway across the blasted world to watch people freaking
disintegrate
, and have nothing to show for it. Those scroll cases contained answers. Answers I was more than ready to learn.

The water flowed at a higher intensity, pounding from the walls. I splashed the final few feet toward the door, turning around one last time to scan the room. Mantorov really was gone, I realized. The portal had swallowed him whole.

But something else was in the chamber that I hadn’t seen before, something etched into the wall in sharp relief. I stopped and stared, despite the rising waters.

A dragon…with its wings spread wide.

“Miss Wilde.”

Armaeus ’s voice had the effect of a compulsion, and I turned around, suddenly aware the water was up to my thighs. This made running problematic, but the stairs beyond the far door beckoned, and I bent forward, racing for the exit.

Chapter Twenty-One

We ended up at the bottom of the basilica’s well. Sounds of continued destruction echoed through the passages.

“Can’t you teleport or something?” I muttered, angling my flashlight up. “Or maybe call upon the Power of Grayskull at least, for some heat? I’m freezing my brains off here.”

“I’ve summoned assistance.” Armaeus leaned against the wall, his pallor evident in the dim glow.

“And I’ve had enough fire for one day, thanks,” Simon’s voice echoed from the far side of the shaft. He was shaking out his electronics, a fruitless task given the fact we were surrounded by fifteen feet of water. “I’ve had pieces of my body fried that are specifically designated fire-safety zones. You could have warned me, Armaeus.”

“You had yet to tap your abilities sufficiently. It’s good for you to start practicing.” Armaeus’s voice held a breathiness I recognized all too clearly, having extensive experience with getting my ass kicked. The guy was feeling his age. And probably those four arrow holes.

Simon groaned. “Well, it’s not good for me to lose data. I couldn’t recreate that temple grid if I tried.”

Armaeus stayed silent, and I eyed him, trying to gauge how much blood he’d lost. Not to mention the whole disintegration thing after he’d opened up the scroll cases.

Cases that he’d then pretty much left for dead. “So what was the deal back there? I thought you wanted to
preserve
magic in the world.”

He winced, shifting against the rock wall. “Preserve the balance. Dark to light. Destruction, of course, is not generally the Council’s stock-in-trade. When one element of magic grows to excess, however, the other must be bolstered. We can usually count on civil or religious conflict to destroy. But even when that destruction happens by accident, it is not our place to stop it.”

“So you planned on leaving those cases behind?”

His smile twisted. “You have them, don’t you?”

I shifted. “Well, yeah.”

“So clearly I did not.” Ignoring my scoff, he continued. “But your concerns are unfounded, Miss Wilde. There will always be magic in the world. It cannot be completely destroyed—ever.” Armaeus shook his head as the great stone lid of the cistern above us moved with a loud scrape. “Magic is not contained in an object or a person. It is merely reinforced or channeled. Just as the waters of the deepest Earth transform into the crystal clouds of the atmosphere and return again as rain, it constantly transforms and regenerates. An endless cycle.”

There was something important here, I knew it. Something I didn’t want to miss. “So once magic is in the world…pure magic, or a pure magical entity…nothing can take it out?”

He hesitated. “Not without great cause. And great sacrifice.”

“Which is not exactly a ‘no.’”

A resounding scrape sounded above us, and hushed voices floated down. No one called out on either side, though, as a rope dropped into the dark space. I flicked the light up again, long enough to ascertain that no guns were being leveled at us. So far, so good. “Simon, you go first,” Armaeus said, pushing the rope to him. “Can you secure the devices?”

“For all the good it will do us.” Simon reached for the rope and pulled himself out of the water, wrapping his fists in the thick nylon as it was pulled taut. He swung toward the wall, bouncing off gently before getting his footing. Moments later, a second rope dangled down.

“Miss Wilde.”

“Not going to happen.” I grabbed the rope and stepped toward him. “Maybe you’re not noticing the giant gaping flesh wounds you’re rocking, but I am. Let me tie you up.”

The slightest hint of amusement flared past his pain. “At last, now we are getting somewhere.”

Still, he didn’t protest as I made a makeshift belt out of the trailing end of the rope. At the last minute, eyeing the seeping mass of his back, I wrapped it around both of us, my chest to his spine. The scroll cases shifted in my jacket, like stolen beer cans after a midnight Stop-N-Go raid. I slid to the right to avoid bruising a rib.

“I could imagine a better configuration.”

“Focus, Armaeus. I don’t want the rope to make things worse. You may want to warn the boys upstairs that they’ll be hauling up a heavy load.”

The rope cinched tight, and I winced, feeling it constrict me against Armaeus’s water- and blood-soaked clothing. My face buried into his back, my hands wrapped around him, I was surrounded by the scent of not only his blood, but cinnamon and heady spices, heat and fire and earth. My arms went naturally around his waist, my hands on his chest, and after a moment, his own hands came up, the warmth of his palms covering my fingers. He said nothing, his mental channel silent for once, but his hands cradled mine as if he was handling a rare and precious gem. The warmth he exuded filled me to the aching marrow of my bones, and I hung, limp and helpless as we were hauled out of the well.

I shouldn’t care that he was hurt, I knew. He’d inexplicably brought hundreds of Connecteds into harm’s way in Vegas. He was doubtless willing to sacrifice hundreds more to preserve his precious balance. He deserved to be hurt, deserved to suffer. And I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t.

The ride back to the airplane in the Egyptian workmen’s SUV was all but silent. Fortunately, we were almost off the temple grounds before the first geyser of water from the ancient temple room broke the surface. The Nile wasn’t due to flood for another good two months, but hey, details. I’m sure the local utilities groups would come up with some way to spin the sudden deluge.

Simon watched a set of flashing lights crest the rise and raced toward the temple site. “Police? Really?”

The Magician’s voice sounded like a long stretch of gravel. “They would have been summoned eventually. I simply moved up the timetable to encourage Mantorov’s men not to return.”

“Okay, but…will there be anything left for them to find?”

Armaeus shifted in his seat. “The chamber was completely sealed off from above when we reached it. By the time we left, it was not. The accumulated weight of thousands of years of debris will crash through the cracked roof. Water will mix with sand, filling the chamber with mud. In time, the waters will recede, and the chamber will remain, perfectly preserved. It will be rediscovered, at length, reasonably intact.”

I frowned. “A length?” Dawn was starting to light the far eastern edges of the sky, and I could see the geyser now. It wasn’t big, it wasn’t strong, but for a land etched out of a desert, it was something of a miracle.

I sensed Armaeus’s gaze on me, but I didn’t turn his way. I couldn’t look at him directly, at the evidence of his trial. I knew his immortality didn’t preclude him from injury, or from death from deliberate action. But in all the jobs I’d worked for him, I’d never seen him bleed. I’d never seen him…vulnerable.

His words seemed more gentle when he spoke again. “I do not possess oracular powers, Miss Wilde, but it isn’t too difficult a guess. The first rushed thought of the authorities will be of buried treasure and national historical value, but that will quickly cede to the realization that a fissure of the Nile has unexpectedly found its way to El Ashmunein, well away from the main line of the river. The god of resources and utilities has more power than Thoth does in this century. Undoubtedly, there will be the Egyptian equivalent of a media uproar, as the two sides draw lines quite literally in the sand, over how the land should be excavated and the fissure both preserved and exploited. If history is any guide, it will be quite some time before the chamber is reopened.

“And the bodies?”

“Mother Nature is notoriously unkind to those souls left exposed in her grasp. A significant amount of water poured into that chamber before sand cascaded down, and any ancient passages that remain will simply allow scavenging animals access to the bodies left in the open. The decomposition process will be swift and, with any luck, complete. At a minimum, it will simply remain a mystery once the digging commences and bodies are found.” I could hear him shift in his seat. “We’ll monitor the situation. If there is a need to intervene, we will.”

Which, I suspected, would be at the intersection of maybe and never. Still, something in Armaeus’s voice tugged at me. He’d been gutted by multiple arrows, but he was the Magician, dammit. Surely insta-healing was a perk of the profession.

Unless…

I braced myself and turned to him. “Those arrows. Was there anything special about them?”

“Special as in how?” The Magician’s voice held a hint of warning, and I slid my gaze to Simon, who continued to mutter over his electronics. How much did the Fool really understand about Armaeus and the other Council members, and what they could or could not endure?

“They just seemed… super effective,” I tried, keeping my tone vague. “I’m not sure, exactly. I didn’t get a good look at them, what with all the blood gushing out of you. How’d you miss Mantorov being down there, anyway?”

Armaeus’s chuckle was wry. “Now that is a pain that will endure long after these wounds have healed. In my blind certainty of my goal, I knew Mantorov was close, but I did not stop to consider that the chamber had already been entered by more traditional means.” He grimaced as the world around us brightened, dawn taking greater hold. “Those arrows were most likely found in the chamber. They were crafted by the Hyksos tribe,” He tilted his head back against his seat, and closed his eyes. “Very powerful, very advanced for their time. Their weapons were considered superior during the fifteenth dynastic period. It is not surprising that they would have been adapted for use in defending the Temple of Thoth.”

“Ah. So they didn’t have any special properties to weaken you?”

“They possessed four large arrowheads that went all the way through me. That appeared to be sufficient.”

“Sure.” It all sounded very neat and tidy, without the obvious “because they’re aliens!” subtext I subconsciously yearned for after too many hours spent on the History Channel.